ABSTRACT The philosophy of the city is concerned fundamentally with normative questions about city life and governance. Our answers to normative questions about the city (including the values and principles we think should constrain it and select policy) depend in no small part on how we choose to model or represent the city in normative inquiry. In this paper, I reconstruct several debates about the philosophy of the city to show how model choice influences our normative conclusions. I finish by critically evaluating those models to offer insight into the difficult task of model choice.
Jake Monaghan (Sun,) studied this question.